Cherry growers.Cherry growers in Washington state bring in thousands of migrant workers A migrant worker is someone who regularly works away from home, if they even have a home.[] Although the United Nations' use of this term overlaps with 'foreign worker', the use of the term within the United States is more specific. each year to pick their crops. The jobs last just a few weeks, and there's always a question of where to house the workers. The growers thought they had a solution: tent camps. The camps would give the workers a place to sleep with hot showers, toilets, and clean drinking water drinking water supply of water available to animals for drinking supplied via nipples, in troughs, dams, ponds and larger natural water sources; an insufficient supply leads to dehydration; it can be the source of infection, e.g. leptospirosis, salmonellosis, or of poisoning, e.g. . But then the Labor Department The Department of Labor (DOL) administers federal labor laws for the Executive Branch of the federal government. Its mission is "to foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners of the United States, to improve their working stepped in. It said the camps didn't meet federal guidelines guidelines, n.pl a set of standards, criteria, or specifications to be used or followed in the performance of certain tasks. , which mandate tents with 7-foot-high walls and solid floors. The feds also said the camps had to have refrigerators and stoves. The growers said that was too expensive. So they put up no camps. The result: Thousands of workers wound up sleeping in their cars or in sleeping bags in the forest. |
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